Wednesday, 3 August 2011

Neverwinter Nights

The city of Neverwinter, one of the last bastions of civilisation in northern Faerun, is in danger from within and without. The rival city of Luskan has allied with various shadowy forces to oppose the city from without, whilst within a deadly plague stalks the streets. The city's rulers call upon a stalwart hero (plus a henchman) to help combat the plague and expose the sinister conspiracy that threatens the city's very existence! Etc!

Neverwinter Nights was originally released in 2002 and was greeted enthusiastically by computer RPG fans, eagerly awaiting the next masterpiece from BioWare following their monumental success with the Baldur's Gate series of 2D RPGs. Neverwinter Nights was the company's first move into 3D gaming, as well as providing a platform for players to create their own adventures and act as the 'Dungeon Master', masterminding adventures for the benefit of their friends. As a result the single-player campaign feels like an afterthought, lacking the epic scale and polish of BioWare's earlier RPGs.

Which isn't to say that Neverwinter Nights is terrible. It's solid and certainly enjoyable enough to play to completion. Playing the campaign cooperatively with friends radically improves the gaming experience. The game is also of historical interest, being the the first game to use the Aurora Engine which would go on to power Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and, for other companies, Knights of the Old Republic II and The Witcher, as well as Neverwinter Nights' own sequel. It's fascinating tracing the DNA of those later and better games to their origins in Neverwinter Nights.

The engine has aged well, and looks great when viewed at high resolution (at least, until you zoom right in, when it starts to show its age). The art style has continuity with the Infinity Engine games, animation (particularly during combat) is fluid and the late-game appearances of larger creatures like dragons and demons are impressively tense. However, the game has only a small number of art assets (creating an object in 3D being a lot more work than simply drawing a 2D sprite) and these are re-used with increasingly tedious frequency over the course of the game. Every mansion looks like every other one, every cave is identical, you'll soon get sick of the forests and only the late-game introduction of a lave-filled dungeon complex breaks up the staleness. Normally I laud games for being long (Neverwinter Night clocks in at around the 30 hour mark), but both the over-use of graphical assets and a fairly thin storyline stretched to breaking point make Neverwinter Night too long. The game should probably have been a third shorter to break up the monotony of the last part of the game. Particularly puzzling is the absence of in-engine cut scenes (which the expansions and a lot of fan modules have) which would have made the game more cinematic and interesting.

The other major problem is that whilst it looks better graphically, the game is a huge step backwards from the 2D Infinity Engine RPGs in terms of story, dialogue and character. The story is predictable (a rather familiar BioWare twist aside), most of the NPCs are unmemorable, and Forgotten Realms fans will be rather unhappy at certain characters - most notably the orc king Obould - being depicted completely differently from the canon. In the game you also only control one player-created character and a single henchman, which is a far cry from the six-man parties of the Baldur's Gate series with their random (and often amusing) dialogue exchanges and complex party inter-relationships. Hours spent traipsing around in silence with a taciturn NPC fighting spiders is more than a bit dull, and seems to have been a deliberate attempt to get people to play co-op with other human players, which may not always be practical. Even when there are dialogue exchanges with other characters, the game keeps them short, perhaps aware that the small text box is not really suited to the long, well-written dialogue that BioWare was famous for at the time.

On the plus side, whilst the main quest is only moderately interesting, there are some genuinely impressive and atmospheric sub-quests. An attempt to save a village trapped in a time warp results in some morally complex decisions having to be made, whilst there's a few particularly nasty conundrums, such as telling a woman who's asked you to find her missing children that they're dead or letting her live on in happy ignorance. These exceptionally good quests are also well-spaced throughout the game, breaking up the monotony of the more standard 'delivery boy' and 'kill everything' quests.

Neverwinter Nights also has another problem: it's very straightforward to find and complete every quest, kill every monster and get every drop of EXP than can be wrung from the game (doing the same in Baldur's Gate II, for example, would probably take over 200 hours, and even then is impossible due to some quests only being possible with the right party/character/stronghold make-up). This will leave you a good 2-3 levels higher than the game seems to have been balanced for at the end, making the final part of the game pretty easy.

Neverwinter Nights (***½) is a solid RPG which starts to fall apart quite badly when you compare it to its predecessors and successors in the BioWare stable; it's probably BioWare's weakest RPG to date (note: I haven't played Dragon Age or its sequel, or Mass Effect 2). There's still much to enjoy, especially when played co-op, but compared to the other great titles from BioWare and their partner companies, it is a disappointment. However, it is well worth investigating for the excellent fan modules and mods for the game, as well as the notably superior expansions, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark. The game is available with its expansions now in the UK and USA.

13 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Another plus to add to this game review - particularly one done retrospectively - is to point out just how much community content and community produced modules there are. There is a vast array of material, the best of which I would suggest is better than the original adventure.

The best stuff can be found here: http://nwvault.ign.com/

By far the most addictive element of NWN - is the toolset, and the ability to craft your own worlds and adventures, and to add community made content to broaden the palatte of environmental design considerably.

Can I also put a plug in for the Premium Modules that were released by Bioware - that included the Wyvern Crown of Cormyr (a plug, since I was part of the team that worked on that mod).

Fair review but the one thing that NWN did brilliantly was set things up for modders, DMs and PWs (persistent worlds) to take over.

I've lost time of all the fun hours that I spent on some incredible PWs and on online DM-run campaigns, both standalone and series. Think WoW without the monthly charge (or whatever frequency players pay at). I've played some truly fantastic user-create NWN modules too.

NWN2 and other games that followed were a bit of a disappointment on that count.

A fair assessment. It's worth noting, however, that the official campaign really is almost incidental when one takes into consideration the treasure trove of excellent user-made modules freely available for the game. There are literally hundreds of modules worth playing, including dozens that compare favourably with many commercial games.

Taken as a package, I think NWN is one of the most important titles ever released on PC and a crowning achievement unlikely to ever to be repeated. While three and a half stars for the official campaign is reasonable, the product as a whole has to be five stars.

I've played Mass Effect. There's a review of it elsewhere. I haven't played ME2, however. My PC is getting long in the tooth and Mass Effect 1 was getting towards the upper end of what it can handle. It won't handle Dragon Age at all.

I'm playing the two expansions and at that point might look at some of the premium modules (the Cormyr one has great reviews) before moving on to NWN2. I've got quite a few games to get through now and very limited time :-)

If anything, the new wave of Bioware games is even cheesier than their AD&D days. Just look for videos of Miranda Lawson and tell me whether storytelling and characters have gotten any more realistic, complex and emotionally-involving than in some older RPGs, and perhaps Transformers is also a better movie than Aliens.

If you have enough time, you absolutely have to try at least a few community modules. The very best ones have a professional level of polish and are VASTLY superior in terms of story and NPCs than any commercial RPGs (except maybe Planescape Torment).

A few suggestions : A Dance with Rogues (partly inspired by GRRM, as you can guess from the title), the Prophet trilogy, the Auren trilogy.

Even BioWare have said that BG2 is, in terms of size and complexity, at the upper limit of what they can do. Using complex 3D assets, wanting to use as much VO as possible and given development time limitations, they are simply incapable of producing another game of that size again. Which is actually quite depressing.

However, Obsidian said something rather interesting recently, namely that they wanted to make ICEWIND DALE III and deliberately wanted to make it as retro as possible (and maybe returning to a 2D, Infinity Engine-style approach, though that's more speculative based on some of their recent vacancies) so they can make a complex RPG far more quickly than going down the 3D route. It'd be a very interesting experiment to see if they can do that and make it profitable and successful.

I love Neverwinter Nights! I play very few computer games and when I do I normally stick to puzzle type games. NWN is one of the few "proper" games that I've really managed to get into. I also enjoyed Dungeon Siege which I found pretty similar in many ways. I only play the single player standard game though, not tried any of the other stuff!

As I have no interest in PW or community modules, I found NWN1's and SoU's campaign to be bland and uninspired. HotU was the only redeeming part of the NWN saga. I found NWN2 to be far superior, especially with the expansions.

Since you'll be playing through NWN2, you need to get the first expansion "Mask of the Betrayer" at the very least. The themes and writing are so reminiscent of Planescape Torment (no surprise there since Avellone did some of the writing) that MotB has been called PST's spiritual successor. I would even hazard to say that it's probably the second best written RPG ever (behind PST, of course). Definitely don't miss out on MotB.

Then again, I find Black Isle/Troika/Obsidian to be far superior to Bioware so...yeah.